Abstract
Blood Ferritin Levels in Pregnant Women and Prediction of the Development of Fetal Intrauterine Growth RestrictionIntrauterine growth restriction is one of the leading causes of perinatal morbidity and mortality. Prediction of intrauterine growth restriction is one of the priority tasks of perinatal protection. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the levels of serum ferritin in pregnant women, which could point to a group of patients in whom possible development of fetal growth restriction could have been expected. In this investigation, we conducted a prospective study of healthy pregnant women between 30 and 32 gestational weeks, who were estimated for ferritin values. Newborn infants of low birth weight for gestational age were recorded in 8.1%. Anemia was not present in any of the patients who delivered low birth weight babies. Ferritin serum levels in mothers of the babies with low birth weight were on average 6.42 μg/L higher than in the mothers with appropriate for gestational age babies (p<0.005). ROC analysis of newborn infants birth weight and maternal blood ferritin levels showed that blood ferritin level had good predictive value. In case the recorded maternal blood ferritin values are above 13.6 μg/L, we can assume with the sensitivity of 64.7% and specificity of 91.7%, that the pregnant woman will develop a condition of intrauterine growth restriction. The missing decrease of ferritin values, erythrocytes, hemoglobin and hematocrit in the blood of healthy pregnant women between 30 and 32 gestational weeks, can with high probability point to the development of fetal intrauterine growth restriction.
Highlights
Ferritin is a protein, the serum concentrations of which are in correlation with total iron reserves in the human organism, and it can be used as a reliable parameter in the estimation of iron deficiency318 Vi{njevac et al.: Blood ferritin levels and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) in pregnancy [1]
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the levels of serum ferritin in pregnant women, which could point to a group of patients in whom possible development of fetal growth restriction could have been expected
We conducted a prospective study of healthy pregnant women between 30 and 32 gestational weeks, who were estimated for ferritin values
Summary
The serum concentrations of which are in correlation with total iron reserves in the human organism, and it can be used as a reliable parameter in the estimation of iron deficiency318 Vi{njevac et al.: Blood ferritin levels and IUGR in pregnancy [1]. The missing decrease of ferritin levels points to decreased extraction of iron from the blood of the pregnant woman by the fetoplacental unit, which can be in correlation with the development of intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). The term infants of less than 2500 g of weight (below the 10th percentile) present with 5–30 times increased perinatal mortality relative to term infants of the weights corresponding to the 50th percentile [5] They are exposed to increased risks of intrapartal fetal distress, intrapartal asphyxia, neurologic developmental disorders, meconium aspiration, intrauterine death, postnatal hypoglycemia and probably the development of type 2 diabetes, obesity, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases and hypertension in adult life [6,7,8,9,10,11]
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